There is an article on the CBC website today about anti-Western feelings in Russia. Someone identifying himself as @FedupRU left this comment under the article:
I see no Slavic people in NATO...Germany, Italy,France, Britain
etc....do they really care about Ukraine?.....Russia is a Slavic country
and wants the best for the Ukraine...its obvious from the vote in
Crimea that Ukraine cannot be trusted anymore to protect slavs...people
in Ukraine want security first and then prosperity comes
second.....Russia offers that.
It fires me up when someone says something that is, as far as I know, contrary to fact. So, when I saw the words "I see no Slavic people in NATO," I checked and found that the following Slavic countries were members of NATO: Poland, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Croatia, and Slovenia. Together, their populations total 67,000,000. Montengro and Ukraine, as well as Bosnia and Herzegovina want to join NATO. If they did, then NATO's Slavic population would rise to 115,800,000. For reference, the population of Russia stands at 144,700,000.
The second point is more fundamental. @FedupRU implies that only Slavs could possibly care about Slavs. I think that says more about him than about the world. Human beings, especially those with shared values, care about each other. Any country that wants to join NATO obviously shares values with NATO.
What are those values? NATO Secretary General Anders Rasmussen said, "In our NATO Alliance, nearly a billion people share not only the same
values of freedom, democracy and humanity – they also share the
capabilities to safeguard those values."
"Freedom," for many people whose countries were in the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, means making sure that Russian domination does not recur. Obviously, this is an lesson from history that some Russians still reject in favour of either a romantic Pan-Slavism or bitter revanchism.
We are nowhere near the end of the Ukrainian crisis. The headlines change daily. What seems clear at this point is that the Russian government is not willing to accept a Ukrainian government that desires closer links to the European Union and, perhaps, eventually NATO. That is unthinkable to Russia, because its major naval base on the Black Sea, since before the days of the Crimean War, is in the Crimea, at Sevastopol. There is simply no good alternative on Russian soil for its naval base in the Ukraine.
Russia's recent annexation of Crimea bears some obvious similarities to Germany's 1938 annexation of the Sudetenland. These are, a country with one ethnic identity (Ukrainian or Czechoslovak) with a disaffected region (Crimea, Sudetenland) in which another ethnic identity predominates (Russian, German). An external power claims that the ethnic minority is being persecuted and claims the right to speak and act in its defence. Finally, it incorporates the disputed land, "reuniting" it to the motherland (or fatherland) of the minority.
The less obvious similarities are more disturbing for what they promise in the future. Like Germany in 1938, Russia has a government that is bitter about its nation's territorial and strategic losses and and is determined to rectify them. The term for such governments, generously provided by the French, is revanchist, which comes from the word revancher, to avenge. The specific forms of revenge that are sought are the restoration of the nation's prestige and status, the imposition of the government's foreign policy goals on nations that would otherwise oppose them, and the reincorporation of lost territory. The word that expresses this last goal, irredentism, comes from the Italian phrase Italia irredenta meaning "the unredeemed (portions of) Italy."
Germany's losses after World War I were designed to cripple the country through economic ruin, territorial loss, and military weakness. Arguably, looking at events since 1989, a Russian could perceive the same principles at work. The defensive ring of buffer states that insulated the Soviet Union from the West, the Warsaw Pact, collapsed. Contrary to assurances made to the Soviet Union, NATO militarized the former East German territory after Germany was unified. Many Warsaw Pact members joined Western economic and military institutions--the European Union and NATO--explicitly to prevent Russia from re-establishing its sphere of influence. Parts of the Soviet Union broke away, forming new, independent countries. As the Soviet Union ended, along with its economic system and its system of government, its successor nation entered a long and severe economic depression that dragged the Russian military down with it. The Russian Federation's humiliating loss against a guerilla army in the First Chechen War of 1994-1996 was proof enough of this.
Vladimir Putin, during his fourteen years in power, has tried to restore Russia to its former status as a great power, as significant as the United States. The economy is growing, largely through gas sales to Europe. The military is re-equipping. The Chechen state was reincorporated into Russia in the Second Chechen War. A Russian-speaking enclave has been torn off Moldova. Two more were ripped out of Georgia. A Russian-speaking segment of the Ukraine has been reincorporated into Russia. Western inaction on Syria has been maintained, partly through Russian statecraft. A "Eurasian" economic union under Russian control has been set up as a counterweight to the European Union. A sphere of influence has been defined by Russia in which it would use all its tools, economic and military, to keep the EU and NATO out. Russia clearly sees both Georgia and the Ukraine within the Russian sphere.
In a sense, Russia is killing a dream the West has nurtured since the fall of the Soviet Union, in which Europe was at peace, its nations' borders were secure, and Russia was a partner to Western nations. Following that dream, Germany set up pipelines to import Russian gas as the majority of its imported energy. Following that dream, the European Space Agency started launching Russian Soyuz rockets from its Guiana Space Centre. Following that dream, Western European nations have reduced their military spending year after year.
A similar dream is equally under threat in Asia from Chinese revanchism and irridentism. The Chinese government likes to tout that it is reversing "a hundred years of humiliation." It is considering the institution of two new public holidays, both of which are intended to worsen relations with Japan: one commemorating the Rape of Nanjing and the other, Japan's defeat in World War II. China is claiming sovereignty over the South China Sea, including islands that, according to UN rules, belong to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Brunei. Its ships and planes are jousting with Japanese ones over another set of islands. It is refusing to participate in multi-party discussions to resolve these disputes. It refuses to participate in a UN deliberation to resolve the contested claims between it and the Philippines. Perhaps most disturbingly, one of its warships almost rammed an American warship.
Chinese irredentism is nothing new. It was behind the 1952 invasion of Tibet and the negotiated acquisistions of Hong Kong and Macao. It is behind China's long-standing claim to Taiwan, which it would prefer to acquire peacefully but is willing, according to government pronouncements, to take by force. What is new is that China is under new leadership that no longer follows Deng Xiaoping's idea of "peaceful rise" with anything like clarity or whole-heartedness. As a result, the world is at a greater risk of widespread war between near-peer powers than at any time since the fall of the Soviet Union.
He came from Warwickshire (in the middle of England, not the South East, where London is). Most of the county was covered with the Forest of Arden. His birthplace was Stratford-on-Avon. And, lest you should wonder, the name means that this place was a “straight ford” on the Avon River. “Avon” originally meant just “river,” so there are a few Avon rivers in England. In fact, the Welsh word for “river” (afon) is pronounced the same way.
His birthplace, as far as Londoners were concerned, meant that he spoke with a strong country accent. That would not have been a big problem, socially, at the time. The famous Sir Francis Drake, for example, was a Devon boy, and would have talked like one of the Pirates of the Caribbean. (grin).
Shakespeare’s father was, at first, quite prominent in this little place. He was in the town government, for example. He was able to ensure that young Shakespeare could get an education in the Stratford Grammar School, which was about 200 years old at the time and still stands. Shakespeare entered the school at about age six or seven and may have had to leave, due to his father’s financial and social problems, about age thirteen. He would have learned his letters, numbers, a little Greek, and (more importantly) the Latin language, as well as Classics and composition. (One of Shakespeare’s friends later wrote that Shakespeare had “little Latin and less Greek.” His English was pretty good, though).
What he did after he left school, we don’t know. One story is that he put in time as a butcher. That would have added subjects to his education that he never would have learned in school.
At the age of eighteen married a twenty-six-year-old woman named Anne Hathaway. She gave birth to Susanna about six months later. Then came the twins, Hamnet and Judith, two years later. Hamnet died of plague at the age of eleven. Susanna married a prominent doctor and did well. Judith, sadly, had troubles including, for a while, excommunication by the church.
Young Master William eventually went to London between 1585 and 1592, and started a career on the stage as an actor, writer, and part-owner of a playing company called “The Lord Chamberlain’s Men,” which became the “King’s Men” after James I succeeded Elizabeth I. His early plays were mostly comedies and histories; his later ones were tragedies. His last works were “tragicomedies” or “romances,” a more complex kind of comedy. This group includes The Tempest. Finally, a small group of his plays are called “problem plays” because there is no way to place them into any of those categories. Computer analysis has shown that some of his plays were collaborations with other playwrights, so we can now say which parts of them were his and which ones weren’t.
He was a successful businessman. He eventually built a new theatre (The Globe). He made money from a grain handling business in Stratford. Shakespeare seems to have retired from the stage in about 1613 at the age of 49. This would make him an old man for the time. The average life span, including the very common infant deaths, was probably around 30. So, not surprisingly, he died in Stratford just three years later.
Shakespeare made sure that both girls inherited money from him directly, although Susanna got the majority of it. And speaking of his will, there is some controversy that it gave to his wife so little: furniture and his “second best bed.” Apparently, though, the custom was that the widow inherited a third of the estate anyway, and the second best bed is the one that the man and wife customarily slept in. The best bed was for guests. So he wasn’t as hard-hearted as one would think.
Shakespeare’s Portraits
Two portraits of Shakespeare were traditionally accepted as genuine, although both were created after his death. The first is an engraving on the title page of The First Folio, a large collection of his plays that was put together and published by Shakepeare’s friends after his death. The other is a statue in the Stratford church, part of a memorial put up for him soon after his death.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's
life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish
fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable
heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood,
unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
Interestingly, The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged were the first two hardcover books that I special-ordered from a bookstore. I have pretty much outgrown my interest in Atlas Shrugged...I have not, for example, bothered to watch the movie. On the other hand, my interest in The Lord of the Rings remains high.
On the third hand, if there is one, Ayn Rand deserves respect as one of a small number of authors who have made a living and a reputation by writing in the English language, although it was not their first language. I call them "ESL Authors," and they are an oddly assorted lot. Ayn Rand, of course, but also Joseph Conrad, Kahlil Gibran, and even Helen Keller. I may do a post on them some day.
It used to be very easy to switch from one user to another in Google Docs, back before it became part of Google Drive. You sign out as one user; you sign in as another. Duck soup.
Now, things are rather more difficult. When you, the default user, signs out, your friendly face appears, along with a prompt for the password, and there is no visible option to change to another user's account.
It took a little work to discover the solution buried in Google's help pages. You should attempt to log in from a browser window that cannot report who you are. Most browsers have an option like this. In Firefox, you create such a window by selecting "New Private Window" from the File Menu. In Google Chrome, you create an "Incognito" window instead. In recent versions of Internet Explorer, you create an "inPrivate" window. Attempting to log in from one of these windows allows you to enter both the user name you want and the appropriate password, just like in the old days when things were a little simpler.
You can tell that a country's proud of a ship when it releases a new postage stamp to celebrate the ship's commissioning. India just did that to celebrate its controversial aircraft carrier Vikramaditya.
Critics of the "new" ship call it "too old," "too late and expensive," and "too weak to match its rivals." It certainly was not the bargain that India had hoped it would be, but it is, nevertheless, a large step in capability for the Indian navy at a price that is justifiable, or close to justifiable.
The ship has an extensive history. It was the Soviet ship Baku from 1982 until 1991, when it needed a new name: Azerbaijan had become an independent country, so its city of Baku became a foreign capital, as far as the Russians were concerned. It would never do to have a capital ship named after someone else's capital city. Consequently, Baku was renamed Admiral Gorshkov. It continued to serve the Russian fleet until 1996 when, for financial reasons, it was decommissioned. In 2004, It was offered to the Indians at what seemed an unbelievably good price: free, on the condition that any necessary repairs and reconstruction be done at a Russian shipyard and that a billion dollars of Russian fighter planes be bought for it.
As I said, the offer seems unbelievably good. No one should have believed it unless he was hopelessly optimistic, corrupt, or some combination of the two. In the end, the ship did receive extensive modifications that changed it from a Kiev class heavy aviation cruiser to a pure aircraft carrier. However, the ship arrived five years late (December 2013) and cost $2.3 billion, exclusive of the air wing.
Is that cost excessive? Well, that depends, in part, on whether an equivalent aircraft carrier could be bought for less money. There is no such carrier. The equivalent carrier that the Indians are currently building, the new Vikrant, may be $3.8 billion by the time it is finished. Like the Vikramaditya, it will arrive five years later than planned.
Realistically, the alternative to buying Vikramaditya was to defer India's dream of a two-carrier navy into the indefinite future. Without Vikramaditya, India's sole carrier in the near term would be the antique INS Viraat, still creaking on with its eleven surviving Harrier planes. In 2018, Vikrant would take Viraat's place, but the two-carrier navy would have to wait until whenever a second Vikrant-class carrier could be built.
On the other hand, if a second carrier could be brought into service now, to serve alongside Viraat, then a two-carrier navy could be achieved immediately. Its strength would only be increased when Vikrant replaces Viraat in 2018. This is the only acceptable option for India. Its navy's experience since 1957, when it obtained its first carrier, is that carriers are essential to the nation's security. India has used a carrier effectively in two wars with Pakistan. The upgrade to two carriers responds not only to Pakistan, which continues to be hostile and volatile, but to a resurgent China, which has recently launched its first carrier, Liaoning, and plans to build more. Buying Vikramaditya gives India a chance to keep up with its regional rival in the number and capabilities of its carriers.
Many critics argue, nevertheless, that Vikramaditya stands up poorly against Liaoning. The critics have a point. Although Liaoning is also a rebuilt Soviet ship, its displacement of 59,000 tons (full load) is considerably more than Vikramaditya's 45,400 tons. Accordingly, it can accommodate a larger air wing than Vikramaditya, if it uses planes of about the same size. However, China has no experience with aircraft operations from a carrier and is experimenting to gain it. In light of Liaoning's incomplete functionality, Vikramaditya is more than a match for the Chinese ship now and for some years to come.
Other critics argue that the technology for launching planes from Vikramaditya is ill-chosen. The differences between the three available technologies matter primarily because they determine what planes can fly from the carrier and how much load they can carry.
STOBAR, meaning "Short Take Off But Arrested Recovery" is the technology used by Vikramaditya, Liaoning, every other carrier built by the Russians, and Vikrant. It requires a comparatively small plane with powerful engines that will drive the plane to take-off speed over the short runway available on the carrier's deck. The plane is loaded with modest amounts of fuel and arms to keep it light enough for take off. When the plane lands on the deck, a tail hook catches a wire that slows and stops the plane quickly: that is the "Arrested Recovery" part of the STOBAR equation.
STOBAR Operations (Take Off from Vikramaditya)
STOBAR Operations (Landing on Vikramaditya)
The carriers that Britain is building now, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, use another technology, VSTOL, or "Vertical or Short Take Off Or Landing." The planes required for this technology are actually able to take off or land vertically. However, to increase the amount of weight allowed for the plane at take off or landing, it will usually have a short take off, similar to that in STOBAR, and a short "rolling" landing without need for arrestor wires. If the plane is coming in light, with its weapons expended and much of its fuel used, it has the option to land vertically, like a helicopter.
VSTOL Operations (F35B Vertical Landing on USS Wasp)
VSTOL Operations (F35B Short Take Off and Rolling Landing Planned for HMS Queen Elizabeth)
The third technology is CATOBAR, "Catapult Assisted Take Off But Arrested Recovery." In it, a plane is attached to a steam-driven catapult that quickly takes it from a standing start to take-off velocity. A recent advance in the technology is EMALS, in which the steam-driven catapults are replaced by magnets that grip the plane and hurl it into the air. CATOBAR launches allow planes to be larger and heavier than short or vertical take-offs do, so they allow a wider range of airplane types and heavier loads to be launched than other launch technologies can manage. On the other hand, CATOBAR is the most expensive and complex launch technology and so only two nations have current experience building CATOBAR carriers, the United States and France.
CATOBAR Operations (Landing and Take Off on Charles de Gaulle)
India is considering making its second home-built aircraft carrier, after Vikrant, a CATOBAR carrier. If it had gone directly to building that ship, however, rather than building its own STOBAR carrier first, it would have multiplied its difficulties past all reason. Arguably, Vikrant is right at the limit of India's shipbuilding abilities. India has had to create the tools to build the tools to build Vikrant, such as a plant to create the right types of steel. Five years late and considerably over-budget, even as a STOBAR carrier, Vikrant would have been impossible to complete as a larger CATOBAR carrier.
Vikramaditya is probably not the dream ship that the Indian Navy could fantasize having. It is more like a used car with a good chassis and a rebuilt engine. There are times and places that such a car is the best solution for a buyer on a schedule and a budget. In addition, the ship has two notable virtues. First, it is the largest ship ever to enter the Indian navy, 16,700 tons more than the INS Viraat; second, its new MIG 29K planes have much greater speed, range, and power than the old, subsonic Harriers on Viraat and are probably competitive with the best planes in the Pakistani air force. Perhaps the postage stamp with Vikramaditya was justified.
There's a BBC article up on how many angry responses on Twitter followed a single reference to "the Persian Gulf." It also mentions that a reference to the Persian Gulf by that name recently prompted some Arab diplomats to walk out of a NATO meeting. For reasons of national or ethnic pride, many across the Arab world refer to it as "the Arabian Gulf," and insist that others do the same, despite a 2006 ruling by a UN panel of experts. To avoid stirring up a wasp's nest, National Geographic lists both names on its maps, and the BBC just calls it "the Gulf."
A similar situation exists with the Sea of Japan, which is a name that incenses many Chinese and South Koreans. They insist that the name which should be used in the English Language is "the East Sea." North Korea, in contrast, prefers "the East Sea of Korea." The matter of renaming it has been raised with both the International Hydrographic Institute and the United Nations.
I will note that, when I was learning Geography in school, both "the Persian Gulf" and "the Sea of Japan" were taught as the standard English names for those bodies of water. I don't see any need to change those terms. Let "the Arabian Gulf" (or its equivalent in the Arabian language) remain the standard term for the Persian Gulf in the Arabian language. Let "the East Sea" (or its equivalents in the relevant languages) remain the name of the Sea of Japan in the Chinese or Korean languages. All the fight is over the terms used in English, and that should be something that only English speakers will decide.
For inspiration, look at another potentially politicized name for a body of water which, somehow, has remained beyond any political controversy. Can you imagine a French person referring to the water between France and Britain as "the English Channel"? Never! It is as much French as English! So the name in French is "La Manche" (the Sleeve) and the name in English is "the English Channel," and no one calls foul on the other's choice. London is Londres in French, Moskva is Moscow in English, Germany is Deutschland in German, and so it goes. Surely, that's the civilized solution.
